Midlife: A Beginner's Guide to Blur

EMI; 2009

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At first glance, Midlife seems like one of those hilariously ambitious compilation titles that bands use when they don't want to admit the game is up-- think every group in its commercial and/or creative decline that calls a best-of "volume one." In Blur's case, the band's four original members have recorded exactly three new songs together this decade, and despite a recent run of successful reunion shows in the UK, they announced last week that they'd not be making new music as a quartet anytime soon.

And judging by the tracklisting, they could have called this Midlife Crisis, as the compilation-- which eschews many of the group's biggest hits and best-known songs for album tracks-- finds them attempting to reshape their identity, reaching for the dronier, artier end of their catalog. As a bonus then, this comp actually serves a pair of actual purposes: To give new listeners interested in the group as an artistic rather than commercial force a nice, career-spanning entry point, and to give those only familiar with the band through its hits (as collected on 2000's Best of Blur or, if you're in Europe, heard on the radio throughout the 1990s) a deeper and wider look at its work.

Still, the first thing any fan will notice is what's missing: Eight of the 18 songs from Best Of have been axed, including key singles "Country House", "There's No Other Way", "On Your Own", "End of a Century", and "To the End"-- the latter two most likely so the 25-song set doesn't repeat too much of Blur's biggest album, Parklife. Chirpy third-tier singles "Charmless Man", "Bang", and "Sunday Sunday" are also absent but unmissed.

So this compilation can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States. Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur-- and this at a time when, thanks to globalization and the internet, the caché of romanticizing other nations as exotic or different largely dwindled. Anglophilia in the States was once the province of those willing to take the time and effort to look outside their immediate surroundings, and with that came the attendant feelings of acting or thinking differently from one's peers that often fuels cultural choices, especially in indie circles. Nowadays, the UK feels and acts a hell of a lot more like, well, the U.S., and the internet has made the practice of looking in on a band from Britain the same as checking out one from Brooklyn. So while it's no surprise that Blur have become more central to American indie listeners' lives this decade, it's not due to intensifying their position wthin niches and subcultures but simply drawing in larger numbers of people.

Blur leader Damon Albarn certainly embraced his Anglo nature at a few junctures in his career-- particularly after a 44-date, morale-sapping 1992 trek around America supporting the warmed-over Madchester of their debut LP, Leisure. The tour left the group frayed and, above all, determined to reject the dour earnestness of grunge. At the same time, Suede became the darlings of London indie by exaggerating many of the basic tenants of British guitar pop-- wit, glamour, artifice. In short, everything grunge wasn't.

With their distaste for America sharpened, Blur played along, going all in on what was soon to be called Britpop, starting with their second full-length, Modern Life Is Rubbish-- the first of three albums in a so-called British trilogy that also included 1994's Parklife and 1995's The Great Escape. Fully embracing the UK's art-pop history, Blur's London- and UK-centric records made them superstars. Less celebratory than they at first seem, these records are teeming with despair and dripping with disdain. From Phil Daniels' title-track monologue to discouraging traffic reports to suicidal thoughts on the Cliffs of Dover, all was not well.

Parklife's low point is also the band's artistic peak: The tempestuous, atmospheric "This Is a Low", with Albarn's reading of the English shipping report over Coxon's backward guitar was an admission that this once-dominant island nation was increasingly sheltered and inward. There is a sort of spectral finisterre quality to the song's tracing the outline of England by boat, and because those shipping reports-- news from the end of the world-- used to sign off the BBC's nightly radio broadcasts, the song almost sounds as if it could be the nation's lullaby. The sun once never set on the British Empire; this song seems to indicate that it now did so nightly-- in a haze of depression and doubt.

It's fitting then that Midlife includes not only the celebratory ("For Tomorrow"), the heavily Anglo-coded ("Parklife"), and the snarky ("Girls & Boys"), but also "This Is a Low" and other nods to the diversity of these albums, chief among them The Great Escape's "He Thought of Cars" (arguably their most underrated song), Modern Life's "Blue Jeans" (a paean to mundanity) and "Advert" (like "Girls & Boys", a riff on consumer and leisure culture), and Parklife's "Badhead" (an odd substitute here for the record's more well-known relationship-splitting soundtrack, "To the End").

Despite the cravenness with which it seemed Blur-- Albarn and bassist Alex James, in particular-- sought and reveled in fame, this portion of their career is dominated by songs about pre-millennial tension, the dangers of conspicuous consumption, and social changes regarding shifts in technology and communication. In retrospect these prescient sentiments are the strongest and most compelling threads of their mid-90s work; rather than celebrate Britain with knees-up Mockneyisms, they often painted real warnings about a nation quickly being engulfed in obsessions with consumer and celebrity culture. In the years after World War II, America's exportation of such culture was seen as powerful, endearing, the sign of an emergent nation that would dominate the second half of the century as Britain once did. By the 90s, however, Blur had correctly identified the U.S./UK axis as perpetually spoiled and distracted and these themes often dominated their songs. But without the moaning and brooding of peers like Radiohead, Tricky, or Pulp, the messages were often glossed over.

Stardom, it turned out, left Blur fractured, with Coxon-- a riot grrrl devotee and dyed-in-the-wool indie kid-- particularly adrift. His torment was poked at by his more jovial bandmate Alex James, who offered jokes like, "What's 50 ft. long and has no pubic hair? The front row of a Blur concert." By the time the group needed to film a video for late 1995 single "The Universal" (also included here), the promo couldn't even hide Coxon's dissatisfaction-- in almost every shot he is absent, sitting on the ground, or barely participating.

Rather than split the group, Coxon's sensibilities instead found root in the band's music, and their next two albums-- 1997's Blur and 1999's 13-- ironically displayed an increased interest in lo-fi and other strands of American indie music, as well as totems of 1970s art-pop such as dub, krautrock, even free jazz and prog. And it was during these years that Blur's fame and reputation in the U.S. swelled, thanks to the endearing "Coffee & TV" video and the arena sports-ready "Song 2". (Mythbuster: Despite Blur being commonly called U.S. one-hit wonders, "Song 2" was the third-highest charting single of their career here, behind "There's No Other Way" and "Girls & Boys".)

Those LPs are sparsely represented here, however. The two big moments listed above, the gospel-tinged global hit "Tender", and UK No. 1 "Beetlebum" are present as expected, but beyond that group only two additional songs from each album are included-- the best of which are "Trimm Trabb", an excellent example of 13's engaging sprawl, and Blur's "Death of a Party", which now sounds like a proto-Gorillaz song.

Early in the recording of 2003 LP Think Tank, Coxon finally left the band. The resulting record finds Blur in a strange space-- neutered without their primary instrumental force, caught between their pop impulses and Albarn's growing embrace of non-Western sounds, and generally disturbed over the Bush/Blair administrations' failures. Three songs here make the cut, highlighted-- not surprisingly-- by Coxon's sole contribution, "Battery in Your Leg".

With hindsight, it's no surprise that Blur's star has shone so brightly again this decade in their absence. Despite the cries about careerism, they rarely settled into one spot for long, and even when they were correctly perceived to have done so-- about one half of The Great Escape really is a Parklife retread-- they were still spreading their collective wings on album tracks and B-sides. (Indeed, the great irony of Blur's second decade is that Albarn, once the prince of Britpop, has spent the past 10 years becoming a 21st century David Byrne, a sharp, respectful pan-global figure through which many U.S. and UK listeners have stepped into multiple strains of African music, Arabic music, Jamaican music-- even Chinese opera.) Whether or not they continue to tour, record again, or really are calling it quits this time, the distance between their years of tabloid fame (and sometimes punchable ubiquity in the UK) and today has stripped away a lot of preening and the press and left their legacy enriched only by their music. Unlike a lot of rock's image-conscious genre-hoppers that music is sturdy, sometimes whipsmart, and endowed with more cracks and crevices and corners in which listeners can become lost than they're often given credit.